Why Having A Brand App Is Essential In The Competitive World Of Restaurants And Food Delivery?

The restaurant and food service business is a highly competitive space where we see new businesses with newer business models popping up every day and the customers are simply spoilt for choices. Thanks to the faster lives with little time, higher disposable incomes, increasing smartphone and internet usage and newer eating habits promoted by globalization! The customer behaviors are so starkly different from what they were 3-4 years back with many preferring to get food delivered to where they are, rather than dining at the restaurant.

Challenges Faced By Restaurant And Food Service Businesses

Restaurant and food service business today must tackle issues of aggressive competition, increasing clutter, fading brand loyalty, and the fast-changing business models. In this context, the bigger businesses with their far greater resources can leverage advertising and marketing as well as dedicated brand apps to break the clutter, make their brand voice heard and keep their large customer base intact.

Small and medium businesses, however, have frugal resources and find it difficult to keep up with the kind of marketing and advertising. Such businesses are often offline and despite having superior quality and taste, have limited reach. Additionally, they are heavily dependent on their brick-and-mortar business, traditional means of food ordering and delivery like phone or website and aggregator platforms that charge hefty commissions.

We strongly believe that having a dedicated app for food ordering for your brand is essential to thrive and flourish in the competitive world of restaurant and food service.

Here are 4 undeniable reasons why.

Enhanced Customer Experiences

Well… Apps are fast-replacing mobile websites with fast evolving customer expectations. Customers don’t want arduous processes (for instance, going to a restaurant, picking up a phone or laptop to place an order, etc.) when apps can get their job done with only a few clicks, taps, and swipes.

With the help of effective personalization, tailored content, frictionless and speedy processes, easy food ordering, automation, live support through conversational bots, rider tracking, customer feedback collection, etc., you can craft authentic, cohesive and elevated customer experiences, ensure better customer engagement and brand loyalty and even improve referrals.

Direct Access To Customers

Small and medium-sized offline food businesses with frugal resources tend to rely on aggregator platforms and third-party food portals to improve reach and sales. When they list on such platforms, they face a huge risk of losing customers to competitors owing to the clutter and noise in these platforms. With a dedicated brand app, you have direct access to your customers. You can craft micro-moments for customers with personalized recommendations, offers, discounts, coupons, updates, alerts, etc. to the customers in a non-obtrusive and instantaneous manner and enhance conversions and revenues.

Improved Analytics

High-quality, actionable insights on customers/ target audience = Prosperity. Brand apps empower you with deep analytics about customers/ target audiences, their behavior, and patterns, needs, context, etc. By leveraging these insights, you can target and forecast better, personalize effectively and deliver better customer experiences.

Cost-Effectiveness

You can reduce costs on marketing and advertising by reaching larger audiences with a dedicated brand app. By integrating social media with your app, you can enable customers to talk about your brand and in turn, improve your organic reach.

“We are a small, local food joint, we don’t have the wherewithal to own a Brand App.” Or do you?

One of the biggest myths is that dedicated brand apps and fully owned digital properties are feasible only for larger businesses capable of investing heavily in developing and maintaining such technology. With the emergence of subscription-based platforms like Uengage, restaurants (regardless of their size, scale, and nature) can build and maintain a dedicated food ordering app for their business in a highly cost-effective and hassle-free manner. We do not charge hefty commissions like aggregator platforms and third-party food portals. So, all your sales and profits belong to you.

Not just that, with subscription-based platforms like Uengage, you have an entire team of tech experts who are working on the technology aspects of your brand app enabling you to focus what matters most – your core business, food quality, flavor, kitchen management, safety and so on.

Build a dedicated brand app for your restaurant/ food service business today and gain a strategic edge to stay ahead of your competition.